Extending the OSS value chain

“To avoid commoditization, telcos should become the focal point of the extended value chain, focusing on digital services and taking advantage of their traditional competencies.” “Global telecommunications study: navigating the road to 2020.” The graph above tells a story about the changing share of wallet (end-to-end value chain) in the telecommunications sector. The three dials […]

How is OSS a strategic priority for telco execs

“Global telecommunications study: navigating the road to 2020” It’s interesting that “Improved IT Systems and Processes” is seen as a strategic priority by around a third of respondents to this executive study by EY. It also implies that improved IT systems and processes are probably only front-of-mind for investment for about one third of Telco […]

The network must at least break even

“I made the point that there was one rule that had to govern any operator shift of focus to higher service layers—the network itself must remain profitable. You can’t say you’ll earn new revenue that in part at least will subsidize a network loss, because competitors with no network and no losses will then have […]

Digital innovation practices

“Gartner’s 2016 CIO Survey revealed five key innovation practices that deliver the highest improvement in digital performance: Crowdsourcing, Different metrics, Formal innovation management and work with Startups. Nevertheless according to the same survey,  CIOs also indicated that these five innovation were the least used.” Sebastian Barros here. I suspect these CIO findings are also mirrored in the OSS industry. How many […]

The small-grid OSS platform

“Perhaps the most egregious platform failure is to simply not see the platform play at all. It is also one of the hardest for traditional firms to avoid. Firms guilty of this oversight never get past the idea that they sell products when they could be building ecosystems. Sony, Hewlett Packard (HP), and Garmin all […]

Small-grids rely on APIs

“The telco’s strategy encompasses three broad categories of APIs, each of which targets a different audience: – Private, internal APIs accessible exclusively to Telstra’s developers; – External, public APIs, that are available for use by third-party developers; and – APIs intended for use by Telstra’s partners. “Each one of these has a different value to […]

Small-grid OSS business model

“Companies often see the disruptive forces affecting their industry. They frequently divert sufficient resources to participate in emerging markets. Their failure is usually an inability to truly embrace the new business models the disruptive change opens up. Kodak created a digital camera, invested in the technology, and even understood that photos would be shared online. […]

Spectacular success – wrong conclusions

“Spectacular success doesn’t lead to deep introspection, which in turn leads to wrong conclusions. You see this all the time, right? Successful companies draw conclusions about how smart and good they are, and then a significant number of them fall off the cliff because they drew the wrong conclusions.” Ed Catmull (of Pixar) here. The […]

Gridlocked OSS cityscapes

“Nine in ten businesses (87 percent) face severe turbulence as they pursue digital transformation, according to research from Bizagi, a provider of digital process automation software. The global study of over 1,000 IT and customer experience professionals finds that businesses are rapidly embracing digital transformation, with 73 percent believing that failure to keep up will […]

Word of mouth is working against OSS

As you might have noticed, I’m passionate about OSS, what they can do now, what they can do in the future and how they can help organisations prosper in this highly digital era. But one of the things I notice when speaking with the vast number of people directly involved or touched by our industry […]

OSS are hidden away

“More people will pay you money to help them achieve a monetary goal than will pay you to give them something pretty to look at.” Web Teacher In recent posts we’ve explored OSS user interfaces and simpler interfaces in particular. But a pretty interface is only useful if helps a prospective client achieve a monetary […]

Not just orchestration but more orchestratable

“The utter complexity of huge, standardized software systems also explains the death of big software. Enormous whole-company projects are often beyond the capabilities of even the most experienced project and program managers – especially when there’s never 100% consensus about the need for such a draconian project in the first place. The cloud has also […]

Is everything that’s automated quickly forgotten?

“For IoT networks to become truly scalable, and not be dependent on a centralized cloud / management platform, decentralization of trust has to occur… and that’s the picture of blockchain! Any decentralized IoT solution should support three foundational types of transactions: – Trustless peer-to-peer messaging – Secure distributed data sharing – A robust and scalable […]

The core of this digital ecosystem

“We’re an industry that still has overwhelming demand for what we do. We’re right at the core of this digital ecosystem; we’re in an amazing position. We enable the digital world to really happen, so without understating the issues we have – the value chain issues we have, the disruption we face – we should […]

The cherry on top

Last week we ran a series of blogs about what the OSS of the future is going to look like. It’s going to be simple, not cluttered. It’s going to provide answers, not just reams of information. It’s going to allow operators to throw questions at it, in natural speech. It may even provide you […]

Festina lente OSS

The picture you see below is of a coin minted by Roman Emperor Titus. It is the visualisation of the oxymoron of Festina Lente, or hasten slowly, where dolphins were known for their speed and the anchor for its stability. In terms of OSS, this is mirrored in the dichotomy of the speed of change […]

Continuous improvement begets enduring success

“My initial reaction to the idea that continuous improvement begets enduring success was ‘makes sense, companies need to reinvent themselves if they want to stay on top for multiple decades and continuous improvement will do that for you’, but that underplays the importance of the point. An insatiable desire for everything to be the best […]

Smart contracts to get things done

“Smart contracts are computer protocols that facilitate, verify, or enforce the negotiation or performance of a contract, or that make a contractual clause unnecessary. Smart contracts usually also have a user interface and often emulate the logic of contractual clauses. Proponents of smart contracts claim that many kinds of contractual clauses may thus be made […]

Building a case… a use case

In yesterday’s post, we discussed how building a story around the resolution of customer problems is a way to attract customers to your solution, yet few in the OSS industry seem to go about it this way. To build this story though, you have to understand your customers. For example: What functionality of yours do […]

The Law of Significance in OSS

“For the person trying to do everything alone, the game really is over. If you want to do something big, you must link up with others. One is too small a number to achieve greatness. That’s the Law of Significance.” John C Maxwell. In the past, national telcos have been able to achieve greatness alone […]